Commit emails are now available on RubyForge for projects using Subversion! This has always been available on CVS-based projects, but I finally got around to putting it together for Subversion projects this weekend. A few notes:

• When I first tried to install SVN::Notify (via CPAN), it failed since the version of Getopt::Long was too old. Then when I tried to upgrade Getopt::Long, it also failed with a message: Makefile:87: *** missing separator. Stop.. Yikes. This turned out to be due to an old version of ExtUtils::MakeMaker. Once I upgraded that (e.g., get into the CPAN shell, type install ExtUtils::MakeMaker) Getopt::Long installed nicely.
• Next, SVN::Notify failed to install due to some broken tests. There were only two failing tests out of 150 or so, so I just did a force install. Everything seems to work fine, so perhaps all is well.
• To install the appropriate post-commit hook requires admin access, so if you want this for your project, please file a support request.
• Initially I'm using the SVN::Notify HTML emails with the colorized diffing thing. If you have suggestions on nicer ways to do these emails, please leave a comment and we can tweak the configuration.

On a related note, some folks have noticed that when doing Subversion stuff on RubyForge they're getting prompted for their password several times. Robin Stocker dug up this nugget from the Subversion documentation:

Note that the Subversion client often makes multiple connections to the repository, though users don't normally notice this due to the password caching feature. When using svn+ssh:// URLs, however, users may be annoyed by ssh repeatedly asking for a password for every outbound connection.

That explains that! All the more reason to use public key authentication rather than password authentication for working with RubyForge Subversion repositories.